While Gabriel secretly rides in their wagon, he overhears Joseph Poorgrass and Billy Smallbury talking about Bathsheba:
“She’s a very vain feymell—so 'tis said here and there.”
“Ah now. If so be 'tis like that, I can’t look her in the face. Lord no: not I!-heh-heh-heh! Such a shy man as I be!”
“Yes—she’s very vain. 'Tis said that every night at going to bed she looks in the glass to put on her nightcap properly.”
“And not a married woman: O the world!”
The reader is first introduced to the men who become farmhands on Bethsheba’s property through this conversation. In this way, dialect is a crucial tool of characterization for Hardy. Before readers are even fully introduced to these men, they hear the way they speak, and—based on this speech—readers perhaps pass some sort of judgment about their education level and values. In this sense, speech functions as an instant indicator of class differences in the novel.
The use of strategic misspellings (“feymell”), reversed word order (“Such a shy man as I be”), and colloquialisms (“O the world”) communicates the sound of their speech through stress and diction. The implication of these misspellings (really, mispronunciations) and slang are that the two farm hands have thick, country accents. Further, the reader can deduce that they are less educated than Gabriel, whose accent is not as extreme, and Bathsheba, who uses little slang.
The two men are excessively focused on Bathsheba’s beauty, vanity, and unmarried status. The reader can draw that these men hold certain old-fashioned, conservative views about women (though it is hard to tell from this passage alone whether the farm hands fall far outside the norm for men of their era in this regard). The use of diction adds realism to the text and immerses the reader more fully into Bathsheba’s world.
